Calling all CSS-enabled geeks: Solve this! Or, Liveblogging a debugging session.

So, for at least the past week, I've been unable to read Wonkette. Not because of the Cheney story (though I'm sure it wouldn't have helped matters any). No, I can't actually see the text. I thought maybe there had been some kind of attack on the site that horked and broke things. But after (at least) a week, I have to assume this is some kind of conscious design decision on their part.

What in the world am I talking about, you ask? Well, here's what I see when I go to Wonkette right now, in Firefox:


Funky, eh? Doesn't really make for good reading.

I went with a hunch I had and checked the site in the other two browsers I test stuff with, Opera and IE. The results, in Opera:

Some text is readable, but the font rendering is horrible in what little is there.

In Internet Explorer:


Huh. Right as rain. Oddness.

I checked out the source of Wonkette's main page, and then went to the stylesheet it refers to (which you can see here). There was this line, which I suspect is at least part of the problem for FF and Opera users:

font-family : "Hoefler Text", Georgia, "Times
            New Roman", Times, serif;

The default font is something called Hoefler Text. I launch Word to see if I have this font and what its dilly may be. I do have it, and here's what it looks like in Word:


So, wazzupwitdat?

A quick web search took me (where else?) to the Wikipedia page about the Hoefler Text typeface. There we learn it was created by Apple to display some thing or other that was awesome about the Mac OS in 1991 (I think the tech on display at the time was OpenText, but I'm really taxing my recall of ancient issues of MacWorld for that info). So, the font came from the migration of data I made from my Mac to this Wintel machine a couple of years ago. (Sidenote: Are they gonna start calling the new Intel-based Macs Wapples? Dibs on coining the term, btw.) Apparently, this particular font doesn't behave well in a Windows environment. So off I went to the Fonts folder.

Long story short: I ended up pulling everything named Hoefler out of there, and the page now looks the same in Firefox and IE, as they're both now using Georgia. Opera still has rendering issues, but I never use Opera for general browsing.

Whatever. What a waste of a perfectly good morning.

So, code monkeys all, I call you to this question: Am I correct in thinking that I just have an incompatible version of the typeface? Or is it something more dastardly with the way Firefox and Opera render pages?